Montana Brown’s red Nike sneakers sat on the front porch for months, still smeared in cow manure. A week before he died, the 15-year-old honors student had taken an illustrated book to pastures near his Frisco home looking for psychedelic mushrooms.

He didn’t find any, so he tried what he thought was LSD on Dec. 14. Convulsions began within an hour after he ingested 25I, a synthetic hallucinogen more potent than LSD. The Collin County medical examiner ruled that his death was connected to the drug.

In what appears to be a growing problem, three more overdosespossibly linked to 25I were reported in McKinney last weekend. They appear not to have been fatal.

Police and prosecutors say the law isn’t being updated fast enough to help them get such drugs off the streets.

The synthetic drug that killed Montana wasn’t on the state’s list of controlled substances when the boy died, even though it had already been made illegal under federal law. Frisco police said last week that they were pursuing a federal case as they continued their investigation.

Efforts to criminalize emerging designer drugs in Texas fell flat in the most recent legislative session, making it more challenging for law enforcement agencies to crack down on the problem.

“It’s our children using this stuff, and it’s killing them,” said Shenandoah Police Chief John Chancellor with the Texas Police Chiefs Association, which supported the legislation.

Nationally, at least 19 deaths have been linked to a set of synthetic drugs known as the NBOMe compounds, including 25I, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. The users ranged from 15 to 29 years old.

Texas Poison Control Network has tallied 25 calls related to NBOMe since 2012. Six came from the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Stymied in Austin

In November, the DEA temporarily added three NBOMe drugs — also known as N-bomb — to Schedule I, considered the most dangerous class of controlled substances.

The 2012 deaths of two Houston-area youths attributed to 25I spurred state Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, to write a pair of bills that would have banned several designer drugs. Though the bills had bipartisan support, a political dispute over an unrelated piece of legislation killed the effort.

The senator plans to reintroduce the bills early in the 2015 session.

“It will be a priority of mine,” she said Friday.

In February, the Department of State Health Services added three NBOMe compounds to the state’s list of controlled substances. The temporary move allows prosecutors to pursue criminal charges, but only misdemeanors, regardless of the amount of the drugs.

It’s a race for police officers and prosecutors, who often find themselves outpaced by drug manufacturers who tweak the recipes of illicit substances to dodge the law.

The Tarrant County district attorney’s office is one of several agencies that backed Huffman’s bills. Charlie Brandenberg, chief of the narcotics unit, said his office has tried to prosecute several cases involving synthetics similar to marijuana.

Though the state banned K2 in 2011, other kinds of “fake pot” have surfaced since. And if the chemistry is slightly different from what’s in the law, dealers can avoid prosecution.

That shouldn’t be the case, Brandenberg said.

“Let’s say you have a 1965 Ford pickup,” Brandenberg said. “That’s basically what you got. Now if you put chrome wheels on it, that changes the pickup, but it’s still a 1965 Ford pickup.”

Law enforcement and public health officials said Huffman’s bills would address that problem by outlawing certain designer drugs and other compounds with the same core chemical structure.

Dueling experts

Like the federal government, Texas has provisions to cover analogs — drugs that are substantially similar to some illegal substances based on their chemical makeup or effects on users.

“It’s a tool available, but it’s very rarely used because of the complexity of it,” said Warren Samms, director of toxicology and chemistry for the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences.

For every case, prosecutors would have to prove in court that the compound in question was similar enough to an illegal narcotic. And as federal cases have revealed, rulings can be subjective because there’s no clear-cut definition of what needs to be shown to prove that, Samms said.

“It comes down to a battle of the expert witnesses,” said Samms, who wrote to lawmakers in support of Huffman’s proposed legislation.

And some cases don’t even make it to court if law enforcement or health officials can’t trace a drug.

NMS Labs in Pennsylvania, which does forensic testing for medical and legal clients across the country, handled its first NBOMe case in 2012.

“They’re very potent, so it takes very little drug to have its effects,” toxicologist Donna Papsun said. “The challenge was creating a test with a low enough detection level so we could properly detect it in the fluids.”

Montana’s father, Eric Brown, said young people think the drugs are safe because they’re easily available.

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